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VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

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Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#41

Post by rwmj »

pierrelf wrote: post #35
coldbrewed wrote: post #4

My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?

I was at the Apache Cloudstack conference just a few weeks ago and it seems most of the integrators are pivoting to moving VMware customers to KVM + CloudStack, and have even upstreamed an auto conversion tool. https://cloudstack.apache.org/

Are they using virt-v2v for conversions from VMware to KVM or something else?

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#42

Post by depereo »

csydas wrote: post #36
coldbrewed wrote: post #4

My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?

While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past clients I've had are considering proxmox and other virtualization stacks, I am not confident there will be a fast answer for this new change in the virtualization realm. Large and Enterprise companies won't really be bothered by the change except the price, and unless other platforms include all the "Enterprise Check-boxes" they think they want, I'm not sur…

With all the 'investment' in ISO27001:* validation of the existing infrastructure choices and the like, I'd be astonished if any move in a large company was able to happen within five years.

From what I've seen none of them have taken this issue seriously, either, and won't until they get squeezed hard enough, at which point they'll have to... spend five years trying to move!

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#44

Post by eddyg »

coldbrewed wrote: post #4

My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?

Don't forget about the open-source XCP-ng[1] to which you can add Xen Orchestra (which is like vCenter; a key reason people use ESXi) which has a flat-rate (no socket, host or VM limits) $2600/year Enterprise license. And XCP-ng even supports migrating from VMware[3].

[1] https://xcp-ng.org [2] https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-features/webinterface [3] https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/10/19/migrate-from-vmware-to-xc... and https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/04/13/how-bedrock-streaming-mig...

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#45

Post by throw0101c »

thedougd wrote: post #8
coldbrewed wrote: post #4

My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?

OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking. The challenge is that companies architect their…

> VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking.

* https://www.vmware.com/ca/topics/glossary/content/openstack-...

* https://www.vmware.com/ca/products/openstack.html

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#46

Post by throw0101c »

NBJack wrote: post #13
thedougd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking. The challenge is that companies architect their…

Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great! Otherwise, prepare to invest in other ways. I'm not going to say VMware has a super intuitive system, but I've gotten surprisingly far at times without a lot of deep knowledge. Well, until the *nix-like kernel in the hypervisor misbehaves....

> Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great!

If you know (say) Ubuntu and Ansible, then there's pretty good automation with openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible. There are a number of moving parts, but an intermediate-level Linux sysadmin can get things going without too much difficulty. There are vendor-provided solutions (e.g., from RH) as well if you don't want to do a fully DIY, or want commercial support.

* https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/

At a previous job we had a team of 4-5, and 1.5 FTEs split their time between our HPC cluster and our OpenStack cluster (20+ hypervisors, ~10 Ceph servers; >350 VMs/instances).

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#49

Post by geodel »

rychco wrote: post #19
freedomben wrote: post #15

I'm used to corporate marketing speak, but damn this is impresively corporate orwellian. This is real copy/paste from TFA, not some parody that I wrote. > Q: Why is this good for partners? > A: The industry has already widely embraced subscription and SaaS, and many partners in our ecosystem have already developed success practices in this area. Subscription and SaaS models provide an opportunity for partners to enga…

This is so hilariously out of touch that I would have believed it was satire without context. This is viral copy-paste quality material.

Sorry, I don't think it is out of touch? I see this kind of thing all the time everywhere.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#50

Post by peeters »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #43

Ah, I see that Broadcom is working on speedrunning the "lose all your customers" game. Not what I would do if I dropped eye watering sums of money to purchase those customers, but you do you, Broadcom.

This has always been Broadcom's MO. They buy a company, determine which of that company's 150/250/500 customers overlap with their core 500 customers, bundle the acquired product(s) with everything they already sell those customers, and then jack up the price on the entire portfolio. Anybody not on the refined core customer list either gets explicitly cut, or is spun off into a second-tier digital sales program where they are ignored until they leave on their own.
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